YouTube: multi ways to make a buck

So 20% of your YouTube screen is now going to be devoted to yet another revenue stream for Google. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s going to be good for you, or so Google claims:

“All the ads we serve need to provide value to the end user,” said Eileen Naughton, Google’s director of media platforms.

This BBC article entitled YouTube introduces video advertsexplains that the advertisement will begin 15 seconds after a user has started to watch a video, but only on 20% of the screen window. It will disappear within 10 seconds if the user doesn’t click to watch it.

While YouTube already carries advertising banners, the introduction of video adverts is Google’s first big push to increase revenues on the video-sharing website, which it bought for $1.65bn (£831m) last November.

According to market expectations, the value of video advertisements on websites will soar to $4.3bn a year in the US alone by 2011.